Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla is a contrarian, and as Jeff Bezos recently said, contrarians are usually wrong—but when they're right, they hit it big.

I interviewed Khosla on stage this week at the 2016 Structure Conference in San Francisco and while most of the discussion was about the future of cloud computing, enterprise startups, AI, and big data, Khosla also dropped a bit of a bomb on the audience.

"A number of people have talked about AI, but I don't think people have talked about the magnitude of the change," he said. "If you look at most IT operations, 80% of their expenses—maybe 90%—is people. You could eliminate 80% of that with AI-type systems. Almost everything IT people do could be highly leveraged [and] maybe replaced by systems, by intelligence. And I think that will be exciting."

"IT is not about IT anymore," he said. "It includes IT, taking 80 percent of IT people out, whether it is IT support, whether it is IT operations or whether it is uptime. You will still need people to plug and unplug hardware when things fail. But maybe you don't even do that other than on a scheduled basis once a month. Today, people hurry to wherever the failure is... Scheduled maintenance is so much cheaper."

Khosla's conclusion was that "over 20 years, 80 percent of the [IT] workforce will be replaced."

Keep in mind that those are 80% of current IT jobs. The next-generation infrastructure will also create jobs in new areas that will be needed to run the algorithms that will replace today's jobs. That will include artificial intelligence, big data, automation engineering, software architecture, etc.

Nevertheless, this is a topic that IT professionals and IT departments need to consider carefully because automation will undoubtedly bring serious change to how IT is run and potentially major displacement for IT workers. ZDNet and TechRepublic have collaborated to publish a series of special reports on this topic: